INTRODUCTORY
THIS volume has grown out of a series of articles contributed to The Times from Egypt between October, 1919, and April, 1920. I am indebted to the proprietors of The Times for permission to reproduce them, but I have amplified and to a large extent rewritten them, as there are many aspects of the Egyptian question to which only the briefest reference could be made within the limits of space allowed to me, however liberally, in a daily newspaper at a time when the world is full of equally urgent questions. As an almost essential preamble to any serious attempt to describe the Egyptian Nationalist movement with which we are confronted to-day, I have reviewed in a few preliminary chapters the story of modern Egypt since that ancient land emerged again little more than a century ago from mediaeval obscurity and almost complete oblivion into the limelight of world history.
The present upheaval in Egypt is not merely incidental to the storm of unrest that the Great War has let loose upon other countries besides Egypt, nor is it due solely to the British Occupation or the British Protectorate. It has far deeper causes. The Egyptian question is bound up with a large part of the world's history for the last hundred years. It dates back to the great Napoleonic struggles of which British sea-power determined the final issue ; it played, under Mehemet Ali, a big part in accelerating the decay of the Ottoman Empire ; it grew